Month: May, 2017

The 2018 Irish Famine Summer School will take place at Strokestown Park House from 20th-24th June 2018. The theme is Irish Journeys: Famine Legacies and Reconnecting Communities.

Strokestown Park House and the Irish National Famine Museum provide a hub for visitors and scholars to experience a uniquely preserved historic house and explore the lives of rich and poor in their original setting.

The 2018 Irish Famine Summer School will consider the Great Irish Famine and its legacies of dispersing communities between Ireland, Great Britain, North America, and Australia. Particular emphasis will be placed on the theme of Irish journeys at home and abroad, including the experiences of Irish emigrants and their descendants in building communities and becoming integrated into their host societies. The themes of homecoming, revisiting Ireland, and reconnecting communities between Irish and diasporic locations will also be central themes.

The annual Famine conference is an international, interdisciplinary event that brings together local, national and international Famine experts. We ask for papers that approach the subject ‘Irish Journeys’ from the broadest possible artistic, cultural, historical, and socio-economic perspectives. We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers and envisage dedicated panels on (but not limited to) the following themes:

Irish Journeys at home and abroad

The Irish Famine Migration to North America, Great Britain, and Australia

Migration, Integration, and community building in Ireland and the diaspora

Artistic, cultural, historic, and socioeconomic legacies of eviction and migration

Enquiries and proposals of no more than 250 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note on the author, should be sent to Dr Jason King: faminestudies@Irishheritagetrust.ie by 1 February 2018. Decisions on proposals as decided by the organising committee will be communicated by the end of February.

Queen Victoria remains a controversial figure for her role during the Great Famine. The widespread belief that she made no financial contribution to assist her starving subjects in Ireland meant that she is widely remembered as ‘the Famine Queen’. The reality is more complex as Victoria did intervene in a number of ways to assist Ireland between 1846 and 1852, mostly though, at the prompting of the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell.

In 1845, when the potato blight first appeared in Ireland, Queen Victoria was aged only 26, married with four young children. She had never visited Ireland and showed little interest in doing so, which was in strong contrast with her love for Scotland. The second failure of the potato crop in 1846 meant that Ireland became a major concern of the British government and its nominal head, the monarch. This was evident in the Queen’s Speech marking the opening of parliament in January 1847, when she stated that ‘the loss of the usual food of the people has been the cause of severe sufferings, of disease, and of greatly increased mortality among the poorer classes’. In the same month, she issued a ‘Queen’s Letter’ calling on Anglican churches throughout the United Kingdom to donate to Ireland, and to observe a day of special religious services to pray for forgiveness. The latter action reinforced the idea that the potato blight was a punishment from God. This providentialist interpretation of the potato failure was prevalent amongst a number of politicians and relief officials, notably Charles Trevelyan of the Treasury. Privately, however, the Queen believed such actions to be irrational and had only called for a day of fast at the request of her Prime Minister.

On a more practical level, at the beginning of 1847 Victoria donated £2,000 to the newly formed British Relief Association, with a promise of more if necessary. Other members of the Royal family also donated to the Association. Additionally, the appeal by the Queen to the Anglican churches had been successful, raising almost £172,000. A small portion of this money was used to help the poor in Scotland who had also lost their potato crop. In October 1847, when it was evident that a third year of famine was inevitable, a second Queen’s Letter was issued, but it raised only £30,000, indicative of the onset of compassion fatigue in regard to helping Ireland.

In 1848, the potato crop was again struck by blight, although it was most severe in the west. At the beginning of the following year, the British government made a small grant to Ireland on the understanding that it would be the final one, regardless of the suffering still evident in the country. In June, as disease and death were showing no signs of abating, the Queen and a number of her ministers made small donations, but the amount raised was pathetically inadequate given the extent of the distress. Around the same time, it was announced that Victoria was going to undertake her first visit to Ireland.

The Queen’s visit in early August 1849, was carefully choreographed. She, accompanied by her husband, Prince Albert, and their children, only visited the east of the country, and they travelled from Cork to Dublin, and Dublin to Belfast, by yacht. For the most part, her public reception was warm, but it also proved divisive, with the Archbishop of Tuam, John MacHale refusing to put his name to a welcome address from the Catholic Church hierarchy. The Queen, however, seemed genuinely pleased with how she was welcomed, writing to the uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, ‘Everything here has gone beautifully since we arrived in Ireland, and our entrance to Dublin was really a magnificent thing … Our visit to Cork was very successful … the enthusiasm is immense.’

Victoria’s only inland visit came when she was in Dublin, staying in the Vice-Regal Lodge in Phoenix Park, the home of the Lord Lieutenant. On Saturday 11 August, she visited Carton House and Estate, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Leinster. Wearing a dress trimmed with Limerick Lace, she travelled there in an open barouche, along the banks of the Liffey. People, included large numbers of the ‘Irish peasantry’ lined the route. When she reached Maynooth, the students of the seminary lined the streets, dressed in their college regalia and cheered as she passed. Thousands of other people had come to the town by train, carriage or on foot.

The Queen entered the estate through Kellystown Gate. Shortly afterwards the royal party and about 40 guests, including the President of Maynooth College, the Rev. Renehan, sat down to ‘partake of a magnificent dejeuner’. While they ate about 160 people were given refreshments ‘of the most varied and costly kind’ in tents erected in the grounds of the estate. At the Queen’s request, a large number of locals including ‘numbers of peasantry’ had been invited to observe her walking about estate. Following the walk, the guests were shown ‘a real Irish jig, which was danced to the music of an Irish piper by a number of the Duke’s tenants and their wives and daughters’. The bagpiper was Sheridan from Kilcock. The press reported that the Queen ‘laughed most heartily at the performers and the royal party seemed to be highly pleased with them’. After visiting a thatched cottage on the estate, the Royal party left for Dublin. Contrary to popular lore, she did not spend the night in Carton House.

Victoria arrived back in the Phoenix Park shortly after 5.00pm, only staying for about thirty minutes. When she left, she travelled to the railway station in Westland Row, taking the train to Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) where the royal yacht was docked. Again, the route was packed with people, and the bay was filled with vessels, with everybody appearing delighted to catch a glimpse of the Queen. Any disgruntlement that existed was eclipsed by the cordiality of the majority of the people. John Mitchel, who at that stage was thousands of miles away, on a prison ship and therefore unable to witness the occasion in person, nonetheless wrote about the royal visit and attributed the warmth of the welcome to the natural kind-heartedness of the Irish people, together with the Lord Lieutenant’s careful precautions to render any dissent invisible.

The Queen’s visit to Carton House in 1849, and the feasting and festivity that accompanied it, gave no indication that, simultaneously, a famine was still raging in parts of the country. Regardless of her interactions with Ireland during these years, Queen Victoria reigned over a government that increasingly turned its back on Ireland, which resulted in the most lethal and devastating event in Irish history that continues to have repercussions today. In that sense, she truly was the Famine Queen.

Christine Kinealy

Queen Victoria, pilloried in folk memory as the ‘Famine Queen’ who only donated £5 in famine relief, in fact donated £2,000 to the British Relief Association in January 1847, making her the largest single donor (multitext project).

Like Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the famine walkers visited the Carton House estate’s Tyrconnell Tower, which was refurbished in the nineteenth century, in folk memory as a famine relief project.

On the final day of the walk, the walkers passed the spot at Clonsilla bridge where sixteen people lost their lives at the onset of the Famine when the Dublin to Longford passenger boat capsized on 25 November, 1845. This deplorable accident and inquest are described in the Cork Examiner and Pilotbelow.

On day five of the walk, the walkers met with Dr Ciarán Reilly who gave them a tour of the Carton House estate near Maynooth. Dr Reilly is the leading expert on the Strokestown Park Archive and one of the most distinguished scholars in the field. His book Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine (Four Courts, 2014) combines incisive analysis of the records in the archive with high quality reproductions of some of its most important documents.

Ciaran Reilly’s book Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine is:

‘The most in-depth study of the effects of the Famine on a landed estate and its community … With the help of this book, we are brought deep inside the actuality of life during the Famine era. Some of our preconceived ideas of what actually transpired during that appalling era are challenged. Highlighted too is the important role played by the Irish National Famine Museum at Strokestown’, from the foreword by Mary McAleese, former President of Ireland.

The Strokestown Park House archive is one of the largest Irish estate collections in existence, with more than 50,000 documents comprising rentals, leases, accounts, correspondence, maps, drawings, architectural plans and photographs. Of particular importance are the papers that relate to the Great Irish Famine. This book aims to introduce the reader to the archive and to provide a fascinating and detailed insight into the many and varied experiences of the Famine for those who inhabited the estate in the 1840s.

In Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine, Reilly traces many of the 1490. In his own words:

While the Strokestown Park archive provides a fascinating insight into people who emigrated during and immediately after the Famine, their fate afterwards is more difficult to track. For the vast majority we are offered only fleeting glimpses of their lives after leaving Ireland. An example is John Coleman, one of ninety-nine emigrants who left the townland of Curhouna during the assisted emigration programme of 1847. Having survived the crossing, Coleman made his way to New Orleans where by 1851 he was listed as being a patient in the city hospital. One of 1,100 men and women, including over 20 Roscommon natives, who sought medical treatment in the hospital in 1851 alone, the ultimate fate of Coleman is unknown. Likewise, Margaret Flynn, aged 24, and her son John, aged one, who were described as “destitute”; having survived the voyage on board the Virginius in July 1847, they made their way inland to St John, New Brunswick, where they found shelter in the city’s almshouses in 1851 (139-142).

More information about Margaret Flynn and her son John can be found here:

Ciarán Reilly has also published The Famine Irish: Emigration and the Great Hunger (History Press, 2016), which includes Jason King’s chapter about the 1490 entitled “Une Voix d’Irlande: Integration, Migration, and Travelling Nationalism Between Famine Ireland and Quebec in the Long Nineteenth Century”, 193-208.

“The archive at Strokestown Park House is a treasure trove for social historians intent upon reconstructing life on an Irish estate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Equally important is the rich deposit of records from the Irish Famine period, which when viewed in the context of other collections available to the public in Ireland, ranks as one of vital importance to historians of the Great Hunger. Moreover, manuscripts generated by the Pakenham-Mahon family provide valuable links to other landed families in Ireland and to larger Imperial and diasporic networks. Thus the archive is not just of local or Irish interest, but provides potential research projects for scholars across the globe.”

Dr Mark G. McGowan

The collection containing over 55,000 documents is of international significance in relation to the Famine period and also a complete record of economic, social, and estate history over a 300 year period.

A dedicated environmentally controlled archive room has been created above the stables and a study centre within the stable wing is being created.

Documents from the Strokestown Park House Archive are also being digitized and made publicly available on the Great Famine Voices website:

Former union workhouse graveyard on irregular plan, used between c.1840 and c.1860. Now out of use. Cut stone gateway to the southwest side having a pair of wrought-iron gates. Located to the north of the former Mullingar Union Workhouse complex and to the north of Mullingar.

This graveyard largely contains the marked and unmarked graves of victims of the Great Famine (1845-9) and acts as a poignant reminder of this traumatic event in Irish history. The good quality cut stone gateway to the southwest adds a touch of dignity to this otherwise largely neglected site.

At the end of the third day of the Famine walk the walkers reached Mullingar and visited the Mullingar workhouse. According to Seamus O’Brien, the “Mullingar poor law union was one of the largest in the country. The union workhouse, which was situated on the northern outskirts of Mullingar, admitted its first paupers in December 1842. Designed to accommodate 800 inmates, it struggled to cope with double this number at the height of the Famine” (Carn, Killare: A Forgotten Westmeath Famine Village (Rathlainne Publications, 2000, 9).

The Mullingar workhouse is described in detail by Peter Higginbotham at:

On the third day of the walk the walkers past through the more remote parts of Westmeath along the Royal Canal. In Famine & Community in Mullingar Poor Law Union, 1845-1849. Mud Huts and Fat Bullocks (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), Seamus O’Brien notes that the villages in the Killare area along this stretch of canal were particularly devastated by the Famine, and that “throughout the union generally the appearance of the population was wretched. Their clothing was in rags” (24). “The biggest losses here occurred,” he adds, “in the southwestern districts of Castletown and Killare where 53 and 40 percent of their respective populations either died or emigrated between 1841 and 1851” (48). Near the Royal Canal are “the ruins of the Famine village on Carn hill and the now fossilized lazy beds which supported it” (56).

In his book Carn, Killare: A Forgotten Westmeath Famine Village (Rathlainne Publications, 2000), Seamus O’Brien this authentic famine ruin. In his own words:

This area of Westmeath belies the usual depiction of the county as a typical part of the central plain of Ireland with its limestone solution lakes, rolling pastureland and extensive raised boglands. The area west of Mullingar is quite hilly. Historic Usnagh hill with the famous “Catstone” erratic on its southern flank, is justifiable the most famous of these limestone hills. Directly opposite Usnagh is Carn hill, a structural limestone fold which has an average elevation of 600 feet above sea level.

Famine village cabins, artist rendering.

The Famine village was in a sheltered central location near the summit of the hill… The skeletal remains of the many stone houses still visible on Carn hill today, as well as being evidence of the last and seemingly final human settlement in this area of Westmeath, are a poignant reminder of the economic pressures experienced in this region during the Great Famine” (9-10).

Historian Jason King finds Michael Collins has spawned new forms of creative energy in finding his own way back to the story of the Famine

In Michael Collins’s novel The Death of All Things Seen, native Canadian woman Ursula reflects on the forgotten “great lessons” of animal and human migrations. She “talked of First Nations people who bore witness along the Saint Lawrence, in the aftermath of the demise of the salmon, to the arrival of a great spawn of a new human misery, the portal, wide-eyed coffin ships, unloading a grim discharge of Europe’s flotsam. The Irish, most notably, those awful, pale-faced, skeletal wretches, ragged in the embattled way salmon rushed headlong against the current in a death run for the spawning grounds to seed the next generation”.

It is a strikingly original metaphor for the Irish Famine migration of 1847. But the metaphor of spawning also marks Collins’s creative process, his return to the original source and difficult subject matter from which his literary career began.

In an earlier Irish Times article entitled “Remembering 20,000 Famine refugees who died in 1847,” (November 26th, 2016) Collins recalled the creative block he suffered when he began to write a Famine novel and establish his reputation. In his own words: “I would spend a year researching the historical record and in the end wither from the burden of inhabiting the psyche of either the Irish peasantry or the landed aristocracy”.

After that year, the novel remained unwritten. “It lives as a singular literary failure that has dogged me,” Collins adds, “given I would eventually transfer a sociological acuity to all things American, specifically the collapse of American industrialism, as captured in my Booker shortlisted novel, The Keepers of Truth. The question plagued me – how could I stand as outsider, impartial witness, and documentarian to another history whilst my own eluded me?”

Book Club podcast

The sublimation of Collins’s Famine novel into his rendering of the rust belt in The Keepers of Truth was the making of his literary career

The sublimation of Collins’s Famine novel into his rendering of the rust belt in The Keepers of Truth was the making of his literary career, one that now spans 10 works of fiction. His penetrating insight into the lives of the struggling white working-class Americans who people his novels set in the de-industrialised mid-western United States seems prescient now that they have played such a crucial role in delivering the Trump presidency. No doubt the Clinton political machine would have been better served by eschewing data driven micro-messaging in favour of lively discussions and character analysis of Collins’s works. As the documentarian of another history, his Booker nomination was no small compensation for his unfinished juvenilia.

Michael Collins has spawned new forms of creative energy in finding his own way back to the genre. One of his outlets is the extreme travel writing he pioneered fusing the roles of author and athlete

Yet something was lost in Collins’s failure to complete his Famine novel. It is a genre that has come into its own with Sebastian Barry’s Costa Prize winning gay romance Days Without End (2016), Emma Donoghue’s acclaimed The Wonder (2016) and Joseph O’Connor’s intricately-plotted, faux-Victorian murder mystery and bestseller Star of the Sea (2003).

Michael Collins has spawned new forms of creative energy in finding his own way back to the genre. One of his outlets is the extreme travel writing he pioneered fusing the roles of author and athlete when Collins ran over 900 kilometres last summer in the footsteps of the Famine Irish from the Grosse Ile quarantine station in Quebec to Ireland Park in Toronto. Not only did he run a marathon a day every day for a month, but he also filed crisp and incisive stories about his discoveries and the people and places he encountered along the route that could only be the envy of more sedentary, desk bound writers.

Dr Jason King presents a copy of Michael Collins’ The Death of All Things Seen to Kevin Michael Vickers, Canada’s Ambassador to Ireland

Before embarking on the run, Collins had paid a visit to the Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger exhibition at Quinnipiac University which was launched by President Higgins when it transferred to the Glasnevin Museum in September 2016. He also read the eyewitness testimonies of the Grey Nuns who cared for Famine Irish emigrants in the fever sheds of Montreal in the digital Irish Famine Archive that I curate. “The most striking fact that emerged in reading the transcribed documents from the time was,” for Collins, “how the municipal authorities, in tandem with the religious orders of Montreal, had marshalled their collective resources to care and minister to the sick and dying Irish,” especially the hundreds of orphans who were adopted by French-Canadian and Irish families.

Yet he was also struck by the sheer incongruity between the Grey Nuns’ stories of compassion, devotion, and self-sacrifice and the stark Black Rock memorial that marks the site where 6,000 Irish fever victims lie buried. It is not only the largest Famine Irish mass grave in North America, but also the most dangerous visit. Indeed, it is situated on a traffic meridian on the busy highway approaching the city’s Victoria Bridge, built by Irish labourers in 1859, while the remains of the Famine dead lie under the asphalt of an adjacent, overflow parking lot that is owned but rarely used by Lotto Quebec. “Why are 6,000 Irish buried under a Montreal traffic island?” Collins asked in one of his Irish Times articles during the run (June 23rd, 2016). It is a question that far too few Quebecers ask themselves.

From May 27th to June 1st, 2017, Michael Collins will join a group of walkers to follow in the footsteps of these 1,490 Famine emigrants from Stroketown to Dublin along the Royal Canal

The Black Rock is also the grave site for some of the 1,490 tenants who were forced to emigrate in 1847 on some of the worst of the coffin ships, such as the Virginius and the Naomi, from the Strokestown Park House Roscommon estate of Major Denis Mahon (who was assassinated in November 1847), now the home of the Irish National Famine Museum.

From May 27th to June 1st, 2017, Michael Collins will be joining a group of Famine walkers to follow in the footsteps of these 1,490 Famine emigrants from Stroketown to Dublin along the Royal Canal. The Famine walk is being organised by the Irish Heritage Trust and Famine Museum in partnership with Waterways Ireland to help establish a new Famine trail. The journey will provide Collins with a new narrative arc to follow the one he created during his Irish Diaspora Run 2016. It is also the narrative arc of a writer returning to his unfinished Famine novel.

Author Michael Collins explains why as an emigrant, a father and a writer he feels drawn to explore his own sense of Irishness

My relationship with The Irish Times started last year when I approached its books editor Martin Doyle about running a marathon a day from Grosse Île to Toronto. He graciously agreed and found funding for me through the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Global Irish Media Fund.

In the year of preparation, both in the (over 6,000) miles run and relying on the support from Famine scholars Dr Christine Kinealy and Dr Jason King, I owe a debt of gratitude. I would also like to acknowledge the help and support of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation and Ireland Park Foundation, Toronto. Though separate entities, they are bookends to a Canadian passage along the Saint Lawrence and their organisational resources have allowed scholars to further research the passage from Quebec into Ontario, two disparate and unique histories that are now being explored in earnest.

Many of the towns that I passed on my run had erected Celtic crosses in remembrance of those Irish who died along the route of the Saint Lawrence. Much of the historical record, including the location of the mass burial of the typhus victims, was lost until Dr King began his research. Efforts are underway to create a virtual historical tour of the journey.

Perhaps it is an immigrant lament, but in the accumulation of years since I left Ireland, and with the advancing years of my children, I feel an obligation to better understand what it is to be Irish

With the completion and release of my 10th book, I have sought to reorient myself toward my own sense of Irishness. Perhaps it is an immigrant lament, but in the accumulation of years since I left Ireland, and with the advancing years of my four children, I feel an obligation to re-engage and better understand what it is to be Irish. We are remembered in the historical record as victims, as a people of a terrible genocide or famine. Indeed, even giving our suffering a name had been a cause of contention.

In a continued effort to help tell our story, I’ve a Facebook page that serves as a digital repository of historical documents that I uploaded during my run last year, along with daily videos I recorded. It continues to be updated. More than 100,000 people visited the page during June/July last year. It can be accessed at facebook.com/irishdiasporarun2016

For many, the rediscovery of a historical event some 150 years past has opened deep psychological scars. Of the 100,000 visitors to our page, many are now availing of online genealogical resources, and adding to the collective story of the passage and eventual settlement of those immigrants who crossed in 1847. The fated story of families separated through quarantine is a recurring motif. For a decade after the passage of 1847, notices appeared throughout Ontario with relatives inquiring after their loved ones. We are actively collecting and collating these accounts.

Indeed, for many of the diaspora Irish I met along the run, the ancestral passage to Canada and America, especially during the hunger years, is still perceived as a form of exile connected to draconian British rule. In total, the Great Hunger accounted for the emigration of more than a million and the death of another million. Even contemporary descendants far removed from the tragic departure of the Hunger years, when asked to reflect on their ancestors’ arrival to Canada, were more apt to characterise it as an exile than an opportunity.

The journey continues. I am participating in a sponsored walk from May 27th to June 1st, 2017, organised by The Irish National Famine Museum. Starting from Strokestown Park House along the Royal Canal and continuing to Dublin, the walk retraces the route of the 1,490 tenants who were forced to emigrate to Quebec in 1847. The museum is also launching a campaign to try to find as many living descendants of the original 1,490 Strokestown emigrants as possible. Ireland’s President Michael D Higgins will greet the walkers along the route.

Again, I am indebted to so many for a year of writing and running, and for being granted the opportunity to reconnect with those at home and afar.